Notice of Public Hearings: Commercial V-Notch Regulations for Southern New England, Annual Amendments to Recreational Black Sea Bass, Scup and Fluke Rules, and Adjustments to the Recreational Minimum Size and Bag Limit for Gulf of Maine Cod

Under the provisions of M.G.L. Ch 30A and pursuant to the authority found in M.G.L. Ch. 130 s. 17A & 21, the Division of Marine Fisheries (MarineFisheries) and the Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission (MFC) have scheduled two public hearings to accept comments on emergency regulations to amend 322 CMR 6.00, as filed on April 30, 2012 and described below. The MFC will vote to adopt these regulations on a permanent basis at its June 7, 2012 business meeting.

V-Notch Requirements for Lobster Management Area (LMA) 2: As effective May 1, 2012, all commercial lobster permit holders authorized to fish in LMA 2 must, prior to discarding, carve a v-shaped notch in the base of a specific pelvic flipper in all legal sized egg-bearing lobsters. The v-shaped notch must be between ¼ and ½ inch in the base of the pelvic flipper immediately to the right of the center flipper as viewed from the back of the lobster.

Recreational Gulf of Maine Cod: As effective May 1, 2012, reduce the minimum size for recreationally caught Gulf of Maine cod from 24” to 19” and decrease the bag limit from 10-fish per angler to 9-fish per angler. This rule change will conform regulations in state waters to regulations in federal waters.

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The information below summarizes privacy policy terms related to content recommendations on Mass.Gov and is excerpted from the full Mass.gov privacy policy.

Purpose: Displays relevant content recommendation based on the site usage pattern of all users of Mass.Gov. If Personalization is enabled (the default setting), your personal site usage pattern today and on prior visits to Mass.gov will be displayed to you and will also be a factor in determining personalized relevant recommendations for you.

Data Collected: A random anonymous unique identifier is assigned and tracked for each user of the website. This identifier is sent to our vendor, Baynote, when you view a page, open a document or click a link on Mass.Gov. Our vendor then analyzes the specific content that was viewed and provides content recommendations to similar content that you may find useful. A full description of what data Baynote collects and how it uses this data is available at http://www.baynote.com/baynote-services-privacy-policy/. Please note that the tool uses persistent cookies. These cookies will be Mass.gov domain cookies and not Baynote domain cookies. The cookies will store information related to a user’s Mass.gov Web site usage, including the URL and title of sites recently visited and the random anonymous unique identifier assigned to the user. In general, and as described in more detail in Baynote’s service privacy policy linked to above, Baynote only uses the personalized information it gathers to provide recommendation services and display past usage for Mass.Gov users and will not share this information with any third parties, including advertisers. The information collected will not affect content you may see on sites unaffiliated with Mass.Gov.

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